


A Time to Build

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Leverage
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 18:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6387805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She realizes it in their scars, visible and invisible. The time has come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Time to Build

The beloved hand lay limp on the mattress when she woke, curved as if to touch her hair. The index finger crooks to the left and an angry red scar stretches across the back. She has cataloged the hurts before, but there’s something stark about it like this. Eliot slept on, oblivious to the observation. Behind her, Hardison wakes up enough to drag her closer into one of his notorious early morning clinches. She runs her fingers over his arm. He’s grown stronger over the years, partially from Elliot’s training and from his own determination not to slow them down. He has scars too, most of them internal on that quick moving mind, but she can find the stretch along his bicep if she wants. She knows intimately the spot on his thigh so small, but so very dangerous where someone had sliced his femoral artery. 

It starts there. That quiet morning with nothing more threatening than a breakfast argument looming on the distance. Hardison won and Eliot made them all pancakes with minimal grumbling while they watched the news. 

“Here,” Eliot thrust her plate at her, piled high with blackberries and drowned in syrup exactly as she liked and she smiles up at him. He flicks a strand of hair out of her eyes, then reaches over to hand Hardison his. 

They watch stock reports and talk about their various plans for the day. They take a week off between jobs now, mandatory unless the next client has an obscene deadline. Mostly they spend the time apart, pursuing their own interests and side projects to careen back together at night. They all have different ideas about what a full night’s sleep looks like, but they all wake up with the rise of the sun and that seems to align their day close enough. 

They didn’t used to. But they didn’t used to do a lot of things. Hardison would still return to bed after breakfast sometimes and sleep until noon if they let him. Eliot would startle awake at odd hours, but he stayed where he was now. Parker had her own routines, but she thought she managed to reign them in enough to make it all work. 

“Microchip for your thoughts,” Hardison holds out a thumbnail size disc. She takes it, studies it in confusion. “It’s the base of the new earbuds. I enhanced the range again.” 

“You’ll be able to reach us on the moon,” she says, a little dreamily maybe, but he just smiles at her and took the disc back. She isn’t sure when Eliot left, but she could feel his absence in the air. 

Getting to her feet, Parker frowns at the stiffness in her knee. It had been shattered two years ago by a baseball bat and despite rigorous physical therapy still wasn’t right. She retreats to her little nook, a closet of a room that Eliot built for her. Their house, a real house nestled in the woods with a perimeter security system better than most FBI compounds, has room enough for all their pursuits. She could have had one of the extra bedrooms or the basement. Instead, Eliot had built her a cupboard in the attic with access to the vents, to the roof, and the rooms below. She loves the space. Today, she folds herself behind her desk and checks over her rigs with obsessive care. 

Her phone jingles with alerts. Potential clients, potential enemies, and an update on one of their sometimes allies. After a few minutes, she reaches out to silence it. The boys know where she is if they need her. She can take the time to parse through her lines. 

She prefers not to think like Nate did. She could always see the moves flitting before her eyes. Parker doesn’t play chess, doesn’t want to. Cons have never been a game to her. If she must choose a metaphor, she would point to a jigsaw puzzle. The picture is already there, it only takes the right eye to assemble it. 

So she doesn’t sit in her aerie and plan. She gives her full attention to her equipment which has saved her life far more times than any densely detailed thought. She hums as she works, tunelessly mostly. Sometimes Christmas carols if it’s cool enough upstairs, regardless of the season. 

“Lunch!” Hardison’s voice reaches her through the vents and she sets her work down and winds back down the stairs. 

The two of them eat sandwiches over the sink like naughty children. They always eat like that when Eliot leaves them alone as if they’re getting one up on him. In reality, he’s the one that’s left the food for them in the first place, on plates in the fridge. His way of telling them when he plans to come back. The more tupperware stacked up, the longer they know they have to wait. 

“Everything good?” Hardison asks as they finish of the last wedge of bread. 

“Yeah,” she leans up to kiss him, then tips away again. “Doing yours next.” 

“Sure, leave mine until after lunch when you’re drowsy,” he grouses as part of the routine, then shuffles off back to his dark den full of screens. He’ll put on his glasses when he’s sure she’s retreated. They’re new and not comfortable for him yet. There are contacts, but no matter how much they bully him, he can’t get past sticking things in his eyes. 

By dinner, she has everything done and back in it’s proper place. She spends the last half-hour looking out her little window at the trees and imagining flying through them on a zipline. It wouldn’t be hard to install one. 

“Hey,” Eliot comes upstairs, his tread lighter and heavier than Hardison’s all at once. “You want pizza?” 

“Please,” she tilts her head back and he brushes a kiss over her forehead without prompting. It delights and scares her how much he’s willing to bend sometimes. “Which place?” 

“I got Antoine’s dough.” 

“You know they make finished pizzas too,” she teases just to watch him huff. She follows him back down, sits on the island to watch him prepare the food. Hardison emerges from his cave, blinking and holding an empty liter bottle of soda to deposit in the recycling. 

“Set the table,” Eliot orders him and Hardison does without a quibble. That Parker does nothing to help goes unremarked. Her chores are different, less about tables and more about the house as a whole. 

Also she likes to vacuum. The sound of detritus clicking up into the hose scratching an auditory itch of hers that she can’t explain. 

“It’s going to snow tomorrow,” Hardison offered, when they’re sitting down. Parker prefers the table dinners. Likes how everyone is equally uneasy and comfortable. “Real snow, not the bullshit flakes we’ve been getting.”

“Plows ready for it,” Eliot pours beer from an unlabeled bottle into both their glasses. For Parker, there is a gin and tonic and she sips it slowly, the bubbles alive on her tongue. 

“I’ve got blueprints for a snow fort,” Parker describes it with her hands, the way the walls will shore up. 

“That’s an igloo,” Eliot corrects and piles up her discarded crusts to show her the difference. 

“We’re not building an ice house,” Hardison puts in. “We have a real house with blankets and everything. We don’t need to live outside for any reason.” 

“How else will I protect myself in the snowball fight?” She asks him. 

“There will be no snowball fight,” he declares, but everyone knows he’s wrong, including him so they all get into planning. 

The week passes too quickly for her liking. Usually by the end she’s hungry for the next job, itching to get it started. Now, she can’t unsee what she’s started to see. They are still good. The best. Their minds are sharp and strong. The old roles have partially fallen away, all of them doing what needs to be done with the smaller crew. None of them take stupid chances. 

But they are a little slower. A little too cautious sometimes. Too worried about what their is to lose now. 

So they do the job and she thinks about it. They take another week off and build a snow fort so large that it will probably keep until the big spring thaw. Parker talks about keeping bees and both of them balk, then give her beekeeping equipment for Christmas. Hardison gives her a book too, but she doesn’t read it right away. Reading is harder for her than she likes to admit, but eventually she circles back to it because she’s bored and it’s there. 

It’s about Sherlock Holmes, but not the fun times when he’s a detective. It takes place later when he’s old. 

He has an apiary and studies his bees. 

She wonders if Hardison actually read this. So she asks. They don’t sit on questions anymore either. They’ve learned that shame passes, but secrets are acid. 

“Yeah, I read it,” he leans back in his chair, two of the legs off the ground. Eliot grumbles about it behind them both and Hardison grins, a private smile. “Did you like it?” 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But...do you think about it?” 

“Keeping bees? I thought we were just dealing with the inevitable there.” 

“Retiring,” she says instead and watches his chair fall back down, hitting the stone floor with hard click. Eliot had picked out the floor. Hardison had found the chairs and table, heavy wood to match the rough hewn look. 

The only things in the house Parker had chosen were the heavy blackout curtains for their bedroom and one enormous chair in the living room that she could curl in when they watched movies. That was enough. 

“I suppose,” Hardison flicks a glance behind him. Eliot puts down whatever he’s dicing to stand between them. 

“We talking about this now?” He asks, hint of annoyance laced through like they had planned to do it later and betrayed him. Parker wonders if that is somehow the case, but decides she doesn’t care.

“Yes,” she declares and leaves the kitchen. 

They have important conversations in the bedroom. She insists on it because they do better naked. It’s just a proven fact and she wishes they would stop arguing with her about it every time. It doesn’t happen this time either, so she just strips down while they’re bickering and then stands there until they give in and do the same. 

She’s not always great with words, but her actions have gotten down right fluent. They settle on the bed, she propped against the headboard, Hardison on his stomach looking up at her and Eliot cross legged at their feet. 

“I think it’s time,” she starts and stops she hears Eliot saying the words along with her. 

“Really?” Hardison looks between them both. “Since when?” 

“Since the Brinks job,” Eliot says. That’s nearly a year ago. 

“That wasn’t a tough one,” Hardison frowns. “What about it?” 

“You were off line,” Elliott doesn’t say more, looks away into the middle distance, reliving something. 

“I remember,” Parker reaches out to put her fingers around Hardison’s wrist, the steady thrum of his pulse there. “It wasn’t for long. You didn’t notice. You were still talking.” 

But they had lost him entirely for an entire breathless minute, Eliot hemmed in by guards on one side, Parker about to careen off the roof and Hardison alone in the server room oblivious. They’d never spoken about it. Parker certainly never realized that it had suckerpunched Eliot as much as her. 

“I noticed,” Hardison says quietly. “I’ve been working the earbuds, haven’t I?” 

“But it’s not enough,” Eliot reaches out too, his hand wrapping around Hardison’s ankle and she is totally right about naked discussions. “None of it will be soon. It won’t be this year or maybe next year, but...” 

“It’s coming,” Parker agrees. “We’re going to slip up. And one of us will die.” 

“Really? Doom prophecies now?” Hardison groans, rolls his eyes. 

Eliot and Parker look over his head. She still cannot believe that she can manage this kind of close communication, but she relishes it. The way Eliot can tell her a secret without moving his lips. The way Hardison tells her how much she’s loved with the bend of his fingers wrapping around her touch. 

“I don’t want to wait until it’s too late,” she says and the words are out there in the world now. 

“Me neither,” Hardison heaves out a sigh. “But we’re too young to retire.” 

“It’s not retirement,” Eliot lays flat out beside Hardison, their skin a play of contrast that wets her mouth. “It’s a rearrangement of priorities.” 

“You sound like one of those marketing guys from the Tamar job,” Hardison tells him. 

They start wrestling and fall off the bed. Parker watches them, considers a life that isn’t full of running and planning. Only a few years ago, the thought had terrified her. 

Now she can imagine Eliot finally starting his own gym, running it the way he thinks should be run and Hardison training baby hackers the way he’s always sort of doing on the sly. She could...there are so many things, she realizes. So many paths not taken or reversed upon. She could go back to school now that she has Hardison and Eliot to explain things that teachers make so opaque. She could contract out for other teams or start a security firm. 

She could go legit or live off their savings for the rest of her life bedecked in diamonds if she wanted. 

“I want ice cream,” she declares and lo, the fighting stops and they both disappear and return with bowls. 

She inverts the spoon over her tongue, let’s sugar and vanilla melt over her taste-buds. 

“We can always go back,” Eliot says, wrinkling his nose as Hardison pours on the strawberry syrup. “It’s not a permanent choice or anything.” 

“Sure,” Hardison points the bottle at him. “If the case is really important. Or interesting.”

“Yeah,” Eliot agrees. 

Parker says nothing. She’s already made her decision and she doesn’t go back. She takes Hardison’s syrup instead and puts it to better use. 

It stains the sheets a bright red, sticks them to their skin, but no one complains. They can always wash them and start fresh in the morning.


End file.
